Category: Standard 1: Know students and how they learn

Why, hello. To cut a long and eventful story short, this post was originally drafted last year, prior to my leaving my school to pursue my long-held dream of traveling around the world in 2020. It was time to move on to something new, and explore the road less traveled. Unfortunately, due to the outbreak […]

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In 2015, I was inspired to establish our school makerspace as a result of my experiences and learning at the International Society for Technology Education Conference. As I have reflected in past posts, it took me years to understand that effective STEM programs were built on inquiry learning pedagogy, curriculum integration, and hand-on ‘maker’ […]

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18 months ago, I had the privilege of attending the prestigious STEM X Academy in Canberra. In January 2019, I was one of four STEM X Alumni invited to return to Canberra, with the job of mentoring the Primary Teachers’ cohort, and sharing my experiences post STEM X 2018. It isn’t often that you can […]

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Over the course of the 2017 school year, my approach to teaching Scratch changed dramatically as I came to better understand how to support my girls’ learning and engagement with Scratch visual programming. As I have previously explored here and here, my students thrive on challenging, authentic visual programming tasks which focus on storytelling and game […]

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A few weeks ago, my library colleague and I accepted, on behalf of our school, a prestigious Catholic Education WA LEAD Award for Excellence in Learning. This award recognized our work in establishing our school’s makerspace and robotics program, which includes a research partnership with the Schools of Education and Engineering at Curtin University. Unfortunately, due to a […]

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Jenny Ashby @jjash may not know it, but her Sydney #slide2learn session on Beebots and coding gave me the push I needed to take a risk, and experiment with Scratch programming in Years 4 and 5 in late 2014. Openly acknowledging in class that I had next to no idea of how Scratch worked, and what it […]

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Over the past few years, I have been privileged to attend two #Slide2learn events, in Perth (2013), and in Sydney (2014). Despite being terribly sick for most of the Sydney event, it made a deep and meaningful impact on my teaching practice. At the 2014 event, Tony Vincent @tonyvincent introduced me to Adobe Voice, an extremely powerful tool […]

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Last weekend, I presented the Dinner Keynote at the Science Teachers’ of Western Australia conference, exploring the topic: Science, ICT, and the Global Classroom: Exploring the Possibilities. Science, ICT, & the Global Classroom (#CONSTAWA33 Dinner Keynote) from Michael Our Challenge: Engaging Students in Science As a primary school teacher & global education specialist, being asked to […]

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On Wednesday (March 27), I completed my four week stint as the #WLPSict integrator. I left with mixed emotions … sadness at leaving a position which I loved, but also with a great sense of personal vindication. I left knowing that I’d done my best, and that I’d done it well. The last week gave […]

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With the help of our international #globalclassroom PLN, this year’s #WorldWaterDay International LinoIt Project was a huge success! We’ve had over 820 hits in 3 days (we’re still hoping to hit 1000!), and received comments from around Australia, Spain, Greece, Denmark, South Africa, Trinidad, Canada, Russia, Taiwan, and Argentina! We even hosted an original music video created by […]